Crisis ready = workforce readiness

Unlocking workforce readiness starts with a trusted relationship with your global mobility partner and ready access to the data you need to support agile decision making. Data includes anything from personal, skills, experience, travel, career milestones and performance data. By aligning your data, your mobility partner can draw insights on how and where to move your people effectively to maintain business as usual.

Unpredictable is the new predictable

From COVID-19 to international conflict, what you can expect is the unexpected. Unforeseen events can destabilize a workforce quickly, which has massive repercussions for the business. These repercussions can include negative impacts on customer experience, employer brand considerations and even loss of revenue.

That’s why it’s critical for global businesses to have frameworks in place—proactively developing continuity and workforce readiness plans to respond to unforeseen circumstances. This includes both expatriate employees and employees who may unexpectedly find themselves working across borders.

Mobilize in the face of crisis

The greatest need to prioritize workforce readiness is in the event of a crisis—and global mobility can help. Ensuring your workforce is ready to move or evacuate involves several moving parts—knowing where your people are, knowledge of local tax and immigration laws, knowing the right people to lean on in a crisis and having the right security support in place, just to name a few.

Not only does your global mobility provider need to have this data and expertise at their fingertips, but they also need to be ready to respond at a moment’s notice. Robust coordination and automated processes are critical to ensure people can get moving fast, especially during a crisis.

Responding to crisis: building resilience through disruption

Covid-19 pandemic

COVID-19 is the center of what we’ve learned in responding to a health crisis. Maintaining the health and safety of your employees is paramount—but that isn’t unique to just a health crisis. The true nuance in handling a health crisis is understanding the action different governments are taking.

With COVID-19, we saw governments have different approaches to remote working policies, border control, travel restrictions and vaccination requirements. There was little to no alignment on health policies within governing bodies during the pandemic, especially as cases fluctuated. When handling a health crisis, your global mobility provider needs to understand the nuance of territorial differences in governance.

When your global mobility partner understands the unique needs of each country, they can get your workforce to the place(s) they need to be to ensure employee wellbeing and business output.

At Vialto, in the first days and weeks of the global pandemic, we rapidly stood up an interactive dashboard, made available to our clients for free, to access up-to-date guidance on Covid travel restrictions and other critical information to inform decisions about how they supported stranded employees. Over the Summer of 2020, we built out our capability into a technology platform that brought together the Covid health content, with additional relevant information on tax, social security and immigration requirements and relaxations.

Ukraine / Russia war

War brings forth some of the most devastating human tragedies and reminds us how profound the human experience can be. The recent Ukraine and Russia conflict has seen one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern times. Within days of the invasion, our crisis team at Vialto Partners launched a free dashboard, sharing critical up-to-date information on Ukraine and Russia’s outbound immigration, tax, social security and payroll information.

Our crisis team provides 24/7 crisis support, helping to support large-scale evacuations from both Ukraine and Russia. We provide advice on immediate and safe routes of travel from strategic advice on mid-to-long term immigration to wider mobility considerations for displaced global workforces.

The inevitability of a future crisis is clear. Companies that plan for crisis will be best placed to respond to future disruption and uncertainty, protecting their global workforces and business continuity.

Emerging er through disruption

Following a crisis, it is important to apply learnings to ensure you’re ready for the next crisis. At Vialto Partners, we work with our clients to analyze crisis responses to help build resilience to disruption.

Key lessons from our after-action reviews have identified that in times of crisis, global mobility teams need:

• To have clear, effective and timely communications
• To be able to take a flexible approach to mobility policies
• To have holistic operational thinking